Faith, Family, & Focaccia

A faith and culture Mommy blog, because real life gets all mixed together like that.

Category Archives: Focaccia

Reflections on my encounters with European cultures, and how they stretch me.


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Broken Body, Resurrection Hope: Day 18 of the April Poetry Challenge

Today is Good Friday – the culmination of the Lenten contemplation of our personal and communal brokenness and our need for the Resurrection that comes on Easter Sunday.

I am feeling, pretty desperately, the need for that resurrection hope after the past few months. Ever since returning to the States in January from our European sojourn I’ve felt compelled to re-engage in a way I had been resisting while I had the excuse of a separating ocean. Specifically, I’ve been re-engaging with the American Church. In a blessed and wonderful that has meant re-engaging with the congregation that sent us out three years ago, and what a homecoming that has been. I have never in my life felt so grateful for a church family.

More broadly, however, this has meant re-engaging with the Christian Culture Wars that are rending the American Church into mutually despising pieces. I have a side in these wars, and I can’t pretend they are over petty things that we should just agree to stop fighting about. Scriptural Authority and the Love of Neighbor are really major issues that go to the core of people’s beliefs – I get that. There is no easy solution.

And yet, my heart has been breaking, each time I read a new Kissing Fish article, or blog post about the World Vision policy switch, or personal story of a former student at my Alma Mater, that all reveal just how broken, and sometimes hateful, my larger church body has become. This Lenten season for me has involved a lot of grieving, and crying out to God for answers – for hope that this supposed “body of Christ “can be saved.

Those are hard prayers to pray, hard questions to ask. But, I’m glad to have gone through this Lenten season, because I have heard an answer. The great thing about Lent is that is ends. And it ends with resurrection. And that is a powerful answer to questions about brokenness and death.

Broken Body, Resurrection Hope
Forty day journey nears its end,

time for reflection and remorse,

a time our hearts are meant to lend

attention to a change of course.

 

And yet… these weeks have witnessed pain

not of repentance, but of pride

that marks white robes, already stained

by ripping wounds caused from inside.

 

This Church, this body, meant to be

united by one Spirit’s breath,

appears, to tear-soaked eyes, to me,

to be a witness more to death.

 

Death of love, and death of grace,

unable to extend a hand

when its own member’s wounded face

asks faithfulness to understand.

 

“I can still love the God you serve

but disagree with you about

five scriptures that expose a nerve,

about the sanctity of doubt.”

 

But wounded hands pull back in fists,

defensive, curled around the pain,

with closed-off ears, both sides insist

“I am the right, you are to blame.”

 

Self-righteousness that tears and rends

a body meant to live as one.

Contracted muscles can’t extend

to open arms as did the Son.

 

For soon we’ll see another form

broken, hanging on a tree

Good Friday calls us near to mourn

the sacrifice on Calvary.

 

Oh, may that memory impart

return to humble brokenness,

give healing balm to bleeding heart,

heal lips that struggle to confess.

 

We all are broken, every one,

and all imperfect in our faith.

By the one Truth we’re all undone.

There is no credit we can take.

 

And brokenness like this is blessed

if it can cause us to return

to love, where arguments aren’t stressed

for we all know grace is unearned.

 

And, despite the bloody trail

the evidence of Church undone,

we can still rise in joy to hail

the Whole and Resurrected One.

 

He is our hope, alive and true

that broken body can still mend.

A dying Church can still renew

leave fear behind and rise again.


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The Smell of Isolation: Day 16 of the April Poetry Challenge

I caught a random segment of NPR this morning while I was driving to a meeting. The reporter was interviewing the author of a new book of “tips and etiquette” for getting around New York City. It was an entertaining interchange that was mostly fluff, but one throw-away comment struck a nerve with me.

Beware the empty train car – there’s a reason it’s empty.

Having recently resided in a major metropolitan city for nearly three years, and having travelled regularly on public transportation, I immediately knew what that comment was about. And it made me uncomfortable.

I was instantly transported back to a half-empty tram car in Milan — it was the back half that was empty. It was an experience that occurred at least six months ago, but it is still hanging in the back of my mind, like a musty old overcoat that was put away before it had the chance to air out from the damp walk through clinging, rain-soaked, autumn undergrowth. There’s an off-putting smell that demands attention… much like the empty train car.

 

The Smell of Isolation

 

The odor was not what registered first,

squeezing onto the crowded tram,

the crush of strangers’ bodies and voices,

eyes darting for a vacant seat,

a corner free of elbows and oversized bags,

where my little ones could safely sit.

The vacant row is what I noticed,

the wide open sanctuary at the back of the car.

Only one stranger

quiet,

legs spread wide,

eyes closed in his haven of space.

The crowd pushed back,

toward me,

or away from him,

but I pushed forward,

toward the long empty row

little ones in tow.

Not until we are seated.

Not until then did I recognize

the heavy scent of unwashed skin,

the wave of oder the pushes out

pushes against the crowd.

Insisting on an indecent distance.

 

I swallow hard

against the cloying taste hanging in the air;

and against my own reactions of disgust.

He is God’s child too.

repeating the words,

like a mantra, a prayer

to my closed eyelids.

They have shut

almost involuntarily

shut out the image of that pregnant cocoon of space.

 

I force them open,

but they still turn away.

Instead they scan the faces

of those pushed to form the surface –

the human portion of that wall –

all curling lips and furtive glances.

I do not want to join them.

the smell pushes on my nostrils too,

causes them to flare, to flinch.

But I do not want to join that group,

do not want my lips to curl in mirroring disdain,

do not want my body to lean away.

But I am leaning.

not away, precisely.

I lean into the space between

a human shield for little noses, little eyes.

It makes no sense.

My body cannot block the smell,

and curious eyes will seek to find

any image they notice me conceal.

But still I lean,

and leaning in my own eyes notice something… comforting?

They. are. oblivious.

Can it be their little noses have not learned disdain for human smells?

Or is it

Please, God, let it be

they have not learned to judge their fellow human beings

by such corporeal matters

as personal hygiene.

 

I do not know the reason,

but I pray fervently that the fruit of knowledge

with not come crashing into their little Eden

on that train.

And while they squirm and giggle in their luxury of space,

I spend the ride tied up in knots

that have nothing to do with the nausea that assaults me

with each inhalation.

Five stops. I count them:

Disgust.

Anxiety.

Pity.

Fear.

Shame.

I ride in a prison of empty space and shackling emotions.

 

But.

There he sits,

eyes closed,

legs spread,

arms folded across his barrel chest,

forbidding all who would approach.

A king upon his solitary throne.

 

Perhaps he has made his peace,

refused the shame,

of the smell of isolation.